I took this pic last week on the day my first official author copies arrived. I was barely wearing any make-up and I hadn’t bothered putting in my contacts and my hair was still half-wet … but I didn’t even care because I was sooooo excited to see how pretty the book turned out!

It’s here, it’s here, it’s here!

Now and Then and Always has (finally!) made its way into the world and I…totally treated myself to Lucky Charms for breakfast this morning. (There’s currently like 30 people who will get why that’s significant. If you read the book—which I really hope you do—you’ll get it too. Haha!)

To celebrate, I’m doing a book release giveaway and you’ll find all the details below. But if you’ll indulge me for a few minutes, I want to tell you just a little bit about how this book came to be…

Man, this book took a long time to come to life. I actually started writing it in January 2018. It was a snowy day and I was sitting in front of the fireplace in my old apartment, feet propped up on an ottoman, and the first words of a story I’d brainstormed almost two years prior found their way onto the page.

I was so excited about those first few paragraphs that I sent them to some author friends and I still have their sweet email replies (*waving at Susan May Warren, Rachel Hauck, Beth Vogt, Lisa Jordan and Alena Tauriainen*) but what I didn’t know then is that it’d be an entire year before I’d be able to fully focus on writing this book. Sure, I wrote a few more chapters here and there in 2018, but eventually a big move to my hometown and a house renovation pretty much took over my life.

And when I finally got back to the story in January 2019, I was sitting in front of a different fireplace this time, with my feet up on a different ottoman…feeling different feelings this time.

Because this, I realized, was a different story.

For one thing, though I’ve had little mystery threads in a couple past books, in this one, the mystery is probably as prominent as the romance. But more than that, this story would be going to some deeper, darker places. The grief and loss faced by the hero (Marshall Hawkins